One of my favorite scenes in Akira is what I would call a turning point in both the anime and manga with Tetsuo losing his arm. I’ve been able to compile three separate drawings of this scene, the sketch, the manga panel, and the anime screenshot. Here they are in order below:

The reason that the manga panel is in the reverse direction of the original sketch is that the Japanese language reads right to left- the translators wanted to ensure that the manga was accessible for western audiences so they flipped all the images in the process.

Personally, I feel like the initial sketch shows the most emotion out of all three iterations of the scene. I feel like the sketchiness and fluidity is lost through the rendering that Otomo does in his polished works, we don’t get to see how expressive Tetsuo is and how much surprise and horror he has upon realizing that his arm is entirely gone.

Obviously, for cinematic purposes, the film decided to change the layout of this scene but I feel like out of all three, the film has the weakest selling point apart from the audio because it loses the detail and is more confined to its medium. The characters themselves were already immensely detailed, especially for the equipment at the time, so it’s understandable that the scene couldn’t match its source material in all of its raw emotion and fragility. (for the animated sequence)